PCIe SATA Card

[Jeff Gaines]

I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card
and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to
connect by RDP!

Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
but the PC is unusable.

All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is
described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x
4 modes).

I can't find a SATA card that would use 4 or 16 lanes, even this card:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN

which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.

What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives,
is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?

Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly -
it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
is if it ever finishes...

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines
I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card
and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to
connect by RDP!
Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
but the PC is unusable.
All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is
described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x
4 modes).

SATA3 is 6Gbps. PCIe Gen3 x1 is 8Gbps. PCIe is not the problem, something
else is.
Look at Host Bus Adapters if you want to connect a lot of SATA drives,
they're proper server grade. Typical consumer SATA cards aren't the same
quality. LSI a commnon chip vendor, and there are ex server cards from
Dell, HP and IBM.

But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is
not the SATA card?

Theo

[Chris Green]

Post by Theo
But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is
not the SATA card?

Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Chris Green

Post by Theo
But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is
not the SATA card?

Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

Defective drive :-(

Explorer spent 5 hours this afternoon copying from source to dest and has
in fact copied nothing but it didn't raise any errors which seems odd.

Drive is < 2years old, was in my NAS, when I took it out I removed
zillions of partitions and set it up as one GPT partition but something
went wrong somewhere.

I've turned the PC off for now as it has has shuffled some drive letters
so I'll take a fresh look tomorrow.

Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

Thanks :-)

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.

(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)

Theo

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have just realised that there is an LSI SAS 9207-8i in my Dell Poweredge
T320 which is a bit older but might do the job. The Dell is going to the
tip, it's too big and heavy for what I wanted but I will scavenge it
first. I remember I blew a new BIOS on the card which means it works as
JBOD and doesn't need a battery. Job for tomorrow!

The Dell ran Win 10 and it recognised the card.

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.

Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too). I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive. So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be
sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink
are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket
with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

Theo

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be
sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink
are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket
with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

Cables arrived, boots with 4 x SSD but slooow, won't boot with 4 x SSD + 4
x Spinners.

Think I'll get an Asmedia 1166 card and keep it simple.

As a side issue the order of drives in Win 10 Disk Management and
MiniTools Partition Wizard is different and neither lines up with what I
thought I had set up. It helps trouble shooting if I know what drive is
connected to what slot.

Is there a definitive way of knowing this?

[Theo]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Theo

Post by Jeff Gaines
I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

Not really. Most server chassis have a bit of airflow which should be
sufficient. With the HP P410 in my Gen7 Microserver the chip and heatsink
are rammed right in an airless corner so I replaced the solid PCIe bracket
with one with holes to allow more airflow from the outside.

Cables arrived, boots with 4 x SSD but slooow, won't boot with 4 x SSD + 4
x Spinners.

Boot time with a RAID card can be slower as it needs to run the RAID BIOS
and identify the drives. It shouldn't make the machine slower to use - if
it does something is wrong with the drives. You may be able to disable
running the RAID BIOS if you aren't booting off the RAID drives (either in
the RAID BIOS settings or in regular BIOS settings).

I would generally suggest using the array for storage and not as a boot
drive - use an NVMe SSD for that.

Post by Jeff Gaines
Think I'll get an Asmedia 1166 card and keep it simple.

Asmedia are generally sane as far as consumer grade stuff goes, better than
JMicron in my book.

Post by Jeff Gaines
As a side issue the order of drives in Win 10 Disk Management and
MiniTools Partition Wizard is different and neither lines up with what I
thought I had set up. It helps trouble shooting if I know what drive is
connected to what slot.
Is there a definitive way of knowing this?

No idea. Does the HBA manufacturer have any addon tools? Or somewhere in
Properties maybe?

Theo

[SH]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So
they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

if you have physical space, nothing to stop you putting a small fan onto
the card's main chip? they are usually identifiable by the passive heat
sink on them.

[Paul]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?

Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

[Picture]

Loading Image...

That's 1" Al angle (it's the thicker one at the store, don't use
the thin stuff) as the stock used.

You cut the material and place the screw hole,
so the end of the piece fits snugly against the PC case (that's what
stops it from drooping, is the snug fit to the case plus one screw
inserted). This particular adapter is for another PC case (Antec Sonata)
and does not fit the case I used for the photo properly.

While you can make brackets that use two screw holes (and
the end does not have to fit snug against the case wall),
that's more work.

The hole I drilled is beveled, to suit the screw on the Sonata.
The screw on the Phantecs fits, but not the beveled part.

You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
fit one yourself).

Fans come in low, medium, high, ultra, and for this application
you would be using a low or medium. The fan draws 12V @ 0.21 amps
so that one is close to a "medium" 80mm square fan. Could be 35CFM
or less. An ultra is 110CFM and you wear ear protectors
while sitting next to it :-) An ultra is 12V @ 1.00 amps.

I started making these, when fanless video cards were invented.
I bought two fanless cards. One ran fine without a fan. The other
one got too hot and used to crash the system in a game. Once
the cooling bracket was fitted and pointed at the
video card passive heatsink, there were no more crashes during
games. Naturally, these cheap cards without a fan, they're
not really gamer material, but you have to pretend sometimes.

Paul

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by Paul

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of
the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of
cooling?

Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???

No!

I don't do anything to push a PC very hard, 95% of the time I'm in Visual
Studio, the rest Office.

[wasbit]

Post by Paul

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Jeff Gaines
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards? I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a defective
drive!

They're SATA (and often SAS too).  I'd expect better error reporting, but
note that the enterprise answer to 'drive failed' is 'throw it out of the
RAID and prompt the operator to plug in another' (or migrate to a hot spare
if you have one) rather than try to work with a failing drive.  So they may
be more trigger happy when a drive does start to fail.
(I assume most of them come with Windows drivers; I've only ever used them
on Linux)
Theo

I have had to order a couple of cables, should arrive tomorrow.
Looking on YouTube there are several set up videos and they all warn of the heat produced by these card, did you do anything special in terms of cooling?

Haven't you ever had to make a cooling bracket for a PC ???
[Picture]
https://i.postimg.cc/k5GTdqyH/make-cooling-bracket-for-PC.jpg
That's 1" Al angle (it's the thicker one at the store, don't use
the thin stuff) as the stock used.
You cut the material and place the screw hole,
so the end of the piece fits snugly against the PC case (that's what
stops it from drooping, is the snug fit to the case plus one screw
inserted). This particular adapter is for another PC case (Antec Sonata)
and does not fit the case I used for the photo properly.
While you can make brackets that use two screw holes (and
the end does not have to fit snug against the case wall),
that's more work.
The hole I drilled is beveled, to suit the screw on the Sonata.
The screw on the Phantecs fits, but not the beveled part.
You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
fit one yourself).
Snip <

Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by wasbit

Post by Paul
You fit a fan and use small cable ties, to hold the fan body
snug against the 1" surface of the angle piece. The fan needs
a three position plug for the wiring and such (some fans
are purchased without the plug on the end, and you have to
fit one yourself).
Snip <

Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

Ultimately how much is your time worth?
I enjoy fixing some things. especially treasured items that can no
longer be obtained.
But a perfectly good 8 year old PC can be got for £75...

[Theo]

Post by wasbit
Nope, never had the need or the thought to do that.
Most people don't have the tools to do that. DIY, PC wise, is going
generally out of fashion. They prefer a bought solution.

It is not hard to find bought solutions, so I'm not sure why Paul is
advocating metal bashing:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bewinner-Cooling-System-Blower-Computer-default/dp/B07N6B5FTS

Most PC cases come with vented PCIe slot covers nowadays, so just keeping
one of those in place gives you ventilation in the slot area. They are also
available aftermarket should you need extra:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sourcingmap-Covers-Vented-Blanking-Computer-Black/dp/B00VG67MQ2

Theo

[John Rumm]

Post by Jeff Gaines

Post by Chris Green

Post by Theo
But something is very wrong if things are that slow - perhaps the problem is
not the SATA card?

Yes, definitely, something is very much awry.

Defective drive :-(
Explorer spent 5 hours this afternoon copying from source to dest and
has in fact copied nothing but it didn't raise any errors which seems odd.

I had a drive fail like that in my NAS once - it basically clobbered the
performance of the NAS to the point where it could not function or
respond to most requests - even to the point it could not really
identify the problem drive.

In the end I had to pull all the drives out, and mount them on a PC so I
could run RAID recovery software on them.

Post by Jeff Gaines
Drive is < 2years old, was in my NAS, when I took it out I removed
zillions of partitions and set it up as one GPT partition but something
went wrong somewhere.
I've turned the PC off for now as it has has shuffled some drive letters
so I'll take a fresh look tomorrow.
Are "Host Bus Adapters" SATA or NIC cards?

SATA (or SCSI!)

Post by Jeff Gaines
I think I would rather have a
card that doesn't sit there like a sausage if it comes across a
defective drive!

There may not be much smarts in the host adaptor - it comes down to the
OS and how it tries to deal with a apparently working - but ridiculously
slow to respond drive. (i.e. the smarts in the drive are working
overtime to "hide" errors from the host by re-seeking / re-reading over
and over to try and access the data)
--
Cheers,

John.

/=================================================================\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\=================================================================/

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Theo
But something is very wrong if things are that slow

+1

Ice o9nly ever used SATA equipped SSDs to replace spinning rust in my
machines and all have shown way faster access times

[Paul]

I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA card and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to connect by RDP!
Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming but the PC is unusable.
All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and x 4 modes).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN
which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.
What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives, is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?
Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly - it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card is if it ever finishes...

RAID cards, you might run them in JBOD mode to use the thing
as a conventional SATA PHY.

These kinds of adapters are normally 300 to 500. A low price
like this is suspicious, unless these are going out of production.
There is no question that SATA is dying, even though hard drives
are not going away (HAMR 32TB, PMR 22TB).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Highpoint-RocketRAID-840C-16-Port-Controller-Black/dp/B09MPTSGM7

PCIE x8 Rev3 (1GB/sec per lane)
16 SATA ports

Customer comments mention a driver signing issue. 64-bit drivers must be signed.
Win10 32-bit will be the last 32-bit way of getting the job done.

RAID cards with hardware support, have an XOR block as part of
the RAID thing. This normally results in a heatsink on top.
A "soft-RAID" card relies on an OS piece of code, to do the XOR,
the driver sparing or rebuild or whatever. Maybe some OS RAM
is used as a buffer for RAID file fetches (real RAID cards
have a DRAM DIMM for a cache module).

If the card has hardware support for RAID, this reduces CPU
overhead, and allows a compute box to do computing and disk I/O
in the same box. Adapters, even lowly ones, use DMA for transferring
file reads into OS RAM buffers, and this is what normally keeps
the overhead low. Your erroneous result indicates something is
not right, either an interrupt storm, or a driver level issue.
For example, maybe somebody has been shipping a WinXP driver
with their hardware since yonks, and now it decides to act up
on Windows 11 :-)

*******

You can measure interrupts in Windows, easily, but the
graph scale calibration is a mystery meat. The graphics card
test used to interrupt at 2000 interrupts/sec.
There is a difference between DX11 and DX12 on the interrupt
rate you expect. DX12 would be lower than DX11. I have not
tested or calibrated graphics across the ages -- I could have
done that, using my WinXP...Win10 machine but that machine
is dead now and my analysis range is now "crimped".

I'll just toss this out and you can play with it. A graphics
card used to be 2000 per second. The interrupt limiter (per card)
was around 10000 to 15000 per second or so. In this demo,
the NVidia SmokeParticle.exe in the Visual Studio SDK they provide,
was used to generate a load so I could "step" the interrupt rate
on demand. Yes, you have to compile from source, to get the EXE.
There are other ways, but interrupt characteristic unknown
(Furmark or a 3DMark run). In any case, when the system is idle,
there might be a few USB interrupts when your mouse whizzes around.

[Picture] Using perfmon.msc to measure Interrupt rate

Loading Image...

Paul

[jon]

Post by Jeff Gaines
I added a couple of SSDs to my server today connected to a PCIe SATA
card and it has slowed the PC to a crawl, so slow it times out trying to
connect by RDP!
Sitting at the PC physically Task Manager doesn't show anything alarming
but the PC is unusable.
All these cards seem to fit in the smallest of the PCIe slots which is
described as PCIe 3.0 x 1. I also have 2 PCIe x 3.0 x 16 slots (x16 and
x 4 modes).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FY9FBTN
which has 4 x host controllers still only needs 1 lane.
What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives,
is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?
Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly -
it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
is if it ever finishes...

How old is this computer.?

[Jeff Gaines]

Post by jon

Post by Jeff Gaines
What do I need to look for to get a reasonable speed out of my SSD drives,
is it lanes or host controllers or chipset or something else?
Advice appreciated, I can't remember when I had a PC running so slowly -
it's in the middle of a job at the moment, I'll check what make the card
is if it ever finishes...

How old is this computer.?

It is based on the Asus Z170K board so around 8 years?